Maybe it’s because I’ve been on a One Piece kick, but one thing I wish was discussed more about Atlantis: The Lost Empire was the fact it did tackle the importance of knowledge and how damaging it is when knowledge is lost, ignored, or heavily controlled/misused.
Milo and Kida start at very similar positions, wanting to learn about Atlantis (Milo for academia, adventure, and to feel closer to his grandpa and Kida to save her culture from dying off and her people’s further regression), but they are stopped by those above them in power.
Milo’s bosses want him to stay locked down in the boiler room rather than listening to him because to them Atlantis is a fairytale, not worth looking into, so they view him as a crackpot like they believed his grandfather to be. Never mind the fact Milo caught on there was a mistranslation in the popularly accepted translation, which does prove he knows his stuff; he gets overlooked because his ideas don’t fit with the academic ideals of his society.
Meanwhile, Kida’s father has allowed his people to become illiterate because he wants to protect Kida, but it also helps him hide his shame in the fact that his arrogance and hubris was what lead Atlantis to sink and his wife to die. Kida is constantly warning him that the people are losing their culture and their way of life is dying, but he ignores it because “the people are content”. Never mind, the fact he orchestrated his people’s ignorance and loss of culture over the 8 millennia since Atlantis sank and Kida has a point that their culture is being lost piece by piece as more of the survivors who remember what happened die off; the knowledge has to be hidden in the king’s mind because he believes that his people will fall into his own mistakes.
Yes, we later learn that the king’s fears are valid, but it comes not from his own people, but from new people who don’t understand exactly what the Heart is and only have a singular person’s account to go off of. Had the king owned up to his mistakes and not hidden the Heart of Atlantis and his people’s history from them, they would’ve been better protected when Rourke came to steal the Heart. Had the knowledge of the dangers of misusing the Heart of Atlantis been taught, it likely wouldn’t have lead to the near murder of the entire royal family because the Atlanteans would know that it was dangerous to misuse the power the Heart granted and be much better equipped to protect it from people like Rourke, who see it as easy money because the Shepard’s Journal had a drawing that made it look like a big gem.
Milo, who is the only one who can read the Shepard’s Journal, doesn’t even understand what the Heart is until he reads the sunken mural in Atlantis that Kida takes him to and he realizes that it is what has kept the people of Atlantis alive. He tries to reason with Rourke, but Rourke has been after the Heart of Atlantis since before Milo’s grandfather died. Milo is trying to reason with someone who has been focusing on his own misconception of what the Heart is for many years and is unwilling to change his viewpoint when new information is presented to him. And it’s what ends up killing Rourke.
Yes, Helga shot the balloon down and Milo cut him with the crystal magic infused piece of glass and knocked him into the fan that killed him, but had Rourke accepted the new knowledge Milo presented him and recognized that this crystal had powers to elongate life well past a human’s natural lifespan? He might have had more sense to not have been wildly wielding a hatchet around it and shattered the glass of the container holding it in the first place.
In fact, Rourke had many signs that the Heart of Atlantis was dangerous, given the Leviathan killed off most of his crew of 200 men and women, the King of Atlantis warned Rourke that they would destroy themselves when asked about the Crystal Chamber rather than playing ignorant, the fact that the Heart turned red just from Rourke kicking a pebble into the water below it (which indicated some form of sentience), he watched the Heart as it controlled Kida and then subsumed her into itself, and Milo told them to not touch Crystal! Kida when she came down. There was a ton of warning signs that ‘Hey, this thing might be a bit dangerous’ that he ignored in favor of his own view of the Heart being a big cash opportunity. He brought about his own ruin.
In the movie, had the knowledge of Atlantis not been lost, hidden, or relegated to mere fantasy, the whole point of what happened would’ve been a warning to not give into hubris and believe you know everything about with a power you don’t fully understand because it could be your own undoing. But because that knowledge was lost, ignored, misunderstood, and suppressed, that lesson had to be retaught and cost multiple people in the movie their lives and nearly wiped out the civilization of Atlantis. (In fact, IRL Plato’s whole story of Atlantis is a warning against letting wealth and power corrupt you because while we don’t have the end of the second dialogue, the whole point was that Atlantis became so corrupted by their luxury to the point that Zeus had Poseidon sink them.)
I just kind of think it’s neat that Atlantis shows the importance of knowledge and history. Plus, the main protagonist gets to be a linguistics nerd.
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